Wednesday Writing

It's an editing day for me, I hope. I guess what I really should say is "it's editing day if work doesn't get in the way," which it will.

One of my favorite things from editing my first MS was when I learned about "crutch words," those words that you tend to use over, and over, and over again. I know I have a ton of them, "I guess," "Anyway," "so," and others.

Here is a blog post about clutch words by Michelle4Laughs: Crutch or clutch words. Throw them in the trash. (A blogger blog).

My first question was "How can you even tell what word is a crutch word?"

I don't remember who first suggested it, but what is recommended is to copy your whole MS and paste it in a program to create a word cloud. The word cloud will find repeated words, tally them, and show you, in an image, what your most used words are. It's fun, funny, and sometimes a little depressing, to see what words pop up often.

Character names came up a lot, which I figured. "I" also came up a lot, but the MS was in first person. But between the very large character names, hid words that were frequent enough to show up in the cloud. I don't remember what they were, but I can tell you, I went back to the MS, did a "Find" command, and took as many out as I could.

I believe this is the generator I used: Wordle.

This is just another way to look at your MS, because we all need a new perspective on occasions.

Wednesday Writing

For this Wednesday, a guide for writers or an insight for readers on what part of the publishing process looks like.

This was posted on Janet Reid's (the literary agent) blog last week, but I thought it so fantastically amazing, it needed to be linked to this week:

http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com/2015/05/query-question-withdrawing-query.html.

The question, as the link suggests, was about withdrawing a query. However, the editing advice for people who want to submit their stories was fantastic. It bluntly tells you the steps and if you (should) consider yourself ready to submit to agents.

Like anything you put your name on, you want to make sure the work you are sending out is the best you can possibly make it. I'm sure the first time I submitted my MS to agents it was the best I could possibly do at the time. Now, I'm sitting on it again, working on another story, and making plans to learn more about writing so that when I face that MS again, I'll be ready to make it even better.

Writing Wednesday

Hey! It's been a week since I (officially) started this blog journey. It's been pretty good.

So, the topic for this Wednesday is editing your writing. I actually get paid to edit business documents and the funny thing is, I was terrible at grammar (still am if I review these posts).

In school, I would never want to learn how to diagram a sentence, finding all the names for the parts of speech tedious. It wasn't until I wanted to write for the fun of it that I actually wanted to learn grammar.

But what to do?

Reading was one choice for me. The more you see it correctly done, the easier it becomes for your to write "correctly" (whatever that really means). Novel writing has some peculiarities compared to grammar and punctuation of normal writing. In addition, the odds are the stuff you learned in grade school has been changed.

The other thing I did? Research. That seems to be one of my strong suits. I searched "how to edit a novel" or common editing mistakes for beginning novelists. There is a ton of information out there (or should I say terabytes of information out there???) I'm not going to reinvent the wheel, listing the advice for everyone when it is already out there, and written pretty well too.

Here are some sites I liked and thought I would share:

Grammar Book- for your grammar needs. This is for everyone. Not just fiction writers.

Novel Writing Help - for punctuating dialogue. One blog, run by editors I believe, stated one cue that the novel was written by a beginner was the incorrectly formatted dialogue. This should help fix that.

Of course, after I write that, I find the blog I mentioned: The Editor's Blog. This links directly to their segment about dialogue.

Here are some more tips that I am still working on: Warrior Writers

Well, that's all for now!